A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t | Hacker News Reader

A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t

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141 pointsege_erdogan176 comments

As a millennial college graduate, my number one piece of advice to college bound high schoolers is do the first two years at community college. The debt is not worth the experience. Most people spend the first two years figuring stuff out, community college is a great place to do that. I didn't even know this was an option until after college and I feel failed by my high school college advisors. Unless you are very confident in what you want to do and get into a very good college you don't think you can get into again, get a full ride, or have ridiculously rich parents, go to community college. Edit: perhaps full ride is too strict a requirement. If you can save money by going to community college, taking into account lost scholarships, you should go to community college.

Disagree.

Graduation rates are drastically lower from community colleges.

There is vastly less academic support available.

The people around you will be vastly less ambitious. This will rub off on you.

Yes 4 year university is now overpriced in America. But if you can, go to a 4 year university.

Yes maybe go to an in-state university instead of out of state if that is cheaper, or go where you get the best financial aid.

Also, make sure that the college(s) you want to go to have a plan in place to accept transfers from the one you want to start at. It does you no good to get two years under your belt at college A in preparation for college B, then find out college B is going to make you start over because the credits don't transfer. Also, how hard is it to get a spot in college B as a transfer from college A. You should know this going in.

What exactly is the negative consequence you are envisioning from 2 years at community college and 2 years at your in-state 4-year school, vs. all four years at the latter?

The typical alternative that people need to be guided away from is one of the for-profit "career" schools that doesn't have transferable credits and is way more expensive than community college.

A lot of people I went to high school with chose to stay home and go to community college to figure things out. Most of them puttered around for a year or two, studying part time while working, eventually getting distracted and abandoning their degree plans.

I think I can count on one hand the kids who actually transferred to a 4-year university and finished their bachelors degree.

I guess dropping out of a community college is a less costly misfire than dropping out of an expensive 4-year university, but anecdotally the people who went straight to university tended to stay there and finish. Obviously, this wasn't a controlled study and the university crew were probably more academically-minded to start with, but it is an observation.

Not sure why you are getting downvoted. What you said is actually true for many that go to community colleges. Do people disagree about this?

I think there are many positives to attend a community college first but there are also several drawbacks that need to be acknowledged.

Staying home and puttering around at a CC can be a better choice than spending time at a big school if you are not ready for it. Especially if you are paying private or non-resident tuition.

My daughter's freshmen dorm roommate should have stayed home. She spent much of her time pining for her boyfriend at home, rarely doing anything outside of class. She got pregnant by the boyfriend and now is dropped out. Kind of a bummer really, she is an under-represented minority who had a full-ride for Chemical Engineering.

Assuming it's true for many that go to community colleges, why are people so committed to the idea that it's cause and effect? What does this claimed pattern have to do with anything inherent about a community college?

Overspending to make a big commitment to something in the hopes that leads to success is generally, on average, terrible advice, in my opinion, even if you think there's some example of it working for somebody at some time.

The point is that a lot of people who go to community college who plan to finish at a state school don't actually make it to that state school.

I agree with the parent comment, the people in community college will tend to be less ambitious and it will likely affect you. This is not a knock on community college folks, it's just different people have different priorities.

I do think that there are many states with excellent public universities that are a comparably great bargain, especially if you can get scholarships.

I'd love to see stats for this, as it seems to me that at the moment the majority of students that go to a community college were less likely to graduate regardless of plans to end up at a state school. It would be interesting to see graduation rates from community college and state college as a function of a student's high school GPA, as that would control for the potential lower quality of students in community college.

I think they envision a lack of support and encouragement, and therefore the student dropping out or not finishing a degree.

In my experience Universities seem to actively filter students. Perhaps I didn't reach out (or the University I attended was particularly bad), but I don't remember much support services when I attended.

Personally, I didn't succeed until I could ask for support, and that was completely independent of being at a private, public, community college, you name it.

I never even realized there was this negativity towards community college until recently, but I suspect it at some level amounts to astroturfing by their competitors, the miserable for-profit career schools that are everywhere. People will make bad decisions; I did after high school, but it's unconscionable to play on their vanity or low self esteem, telling them they're not good enough for a real college or that a real college isn't good enough for them, either way.

Could it be that the perceived necessity of attending a 4 year school from the get-go is causing some of these issues? If the expectation is that good students go to 4 year schools, which I believe it currently is, then only the less ambitious students will go to community colleges. It's a positive feedback loop that could be broken by making prospective students aware of the financial and self-discovery benefits of community colleges.

Some of the best professors I had were at the community college I attended before transferring to a much larger 4 year school. The class sizes were smaller and they had more time to help their students than their 4 year school counterparts.

Hard disagree. You’ll find just as many unambitious individuals in any given first-year course at a university as you might at a CC. It’s a better investment all around.

I think OP was suggesting to go to a community college for the first two years, then transfer to a university for the second half of your undergrad. Most colleges (at least in Canada & US) have transferable credits at this level. I agree with OP that this is a good approach. In addition to being cheaper, the community college experience tends to be better in the first year or two because the instructor to student ratio in the mandatory courses tends to be better.

As a EUian: look overseas. Many universities in Europe offer programs in English. It'll be an even mind-broadening experience, and it's significantly more affordable (I'll take this link from 2018 as a baseline: https://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/student-finance... ).

As a EUian, college in your own country could be near free, some fees but heavily government sponsored. For foreign students the pricing model is completely different, in fact this is the college's big cash cow, so that may make the equation very different for those you're so kindly inviting in. I'm all for the exchange experience, though!

> The people around you will be vastly less ambitious. This will rub off on you.

Most community college people I have encountered are extremely ambitious — they are working full time while busting ass to achieve in school. The myth that community college is a bastion of the academically weak is wrong. I saw plenty of people at my prestigious school with ambitions that centered around parties and getting laid.

This was my experience as well. Pretty much everyone at CC was there to get an education, usually with specific employment goals. At University, it was more like 50%.

>Graduation rates are drastically lower from community colleges.

how is that a useful metric for anything, really?

Look how many extra programs pull people into community colleges, and look at the difference in accessibility between community colleges and universities.

A stay-at-home mother isn't going to be eyeballing Stanford as a viable way to get her nursing degree with night classes. In the same instance, a stay-at-home mother who is using community college in order to get a degree necessarily has a lot more difficulty in managing her time and money than a university aged adult being sent to university by their parents with far fewer personal responsibilities and burdens.

The stay-at-home mother will necessarily have higher drop-out rates just simply from things that exist as burdens in their life from the get-go. As will the displaced worker who is being funded by the state for re-training at their local colleges.

University life is designed to reduce burden on the student in order to facilitate their learning. Comparing metrics like drop-out rates between universities and community colleges is wholly unfair. They both result in degrees, but they serve (mostly) different communities of people.

I don't know. I have a friend who got a PhD from UW as a "stay at home mother".

It's a metric of exactly what you're describing. Going to a community college means immersing yourself in a community of people who see academics as a more of a luxury and less of a necessity; people who have other priorities in life, and will only participate to the extent that it doesn't interfere with their more important goals and obligations.

>They both result in degrees, but they serve (mostly) different communities of people.

Right - and if you're a recent high school grad with the grades to go to a good state school (not just Berkeley or whatever) and a desire to be around your peers while fully dedicating yourself to your education, you're not really in the target audience for community college.

Depends on the schools I guess.

My peers at a top 10 public school didn't get nearly the pre-engineering education I got at a nearby community college.

Primarily because their core courses (math, physics, chemistry) were weed out courses for engineering and med school with 200-300 people in them. In contrast, my core courses had about 20-40 people in them.

Note, I am not claiming any prescience here. I didn't have a choice in the matter. I started my pre-engineering slog at Math 085 (Pre-Algebra 2, I think) at CC after four years in the Army.

Circumstances are much different for my kids, one went to Westpoint (USMA) and the other is going to a big state school, but she is in their honors college. So, honor college courses and AP credits have enabled her to bypass the weed-out jumbo core classes. And, I am paying for everything so loans are not a concern for her.

I don't think you read the article. It's telling people to defer a year because of coronavirus, not the usual college is not worth it schpeel.

That being said, I disagree with your advice in two cases:

1) Most top schools offer free tuition if your family income is below a generous threshold (like $150k). If you can get into Stanford and meet this criteria, it's cheaper than your local community college.

2) If you are studying a technical field, even if you are average, a degree has greater ROI than just about anything else. You can pay off your debt in the first few years out of school and continue earning dividends for the rest of your life.

If you are an average student and studying a non-technical field, then the decision is not as clear.

I read the article and I am saying instead of deferring a year of college go to community college. You should do this regardless of the covid.

Yes if, as he says, you're satisfied with your community college being mostly remote classes, because that could well be what you end up with.

> 2) If you are studying a technical field, even if you are average, a degree has greater ROI than just about anything else. You can pay off your debt in the first few years out of school and continue earning dividends for the rest of your life.

What's the downside to going to a community college? Where I grew up the credits were transferable.

They did say, "Most people spend the first two years figuring stuff out". I went to college knowing I wanted to study computers, but didn't know what specifically. If I changed fields I'd still have the first 2 years to pay back.

I wish I had gone to a community college first. I overpaid for a worse educational experience. There was too much competition for core classes. So you had to wait semesters to get in. When you did get in the class sizes were much larger. Equivalent, transferrable classes were available, cheaper, and had smaller class sizes at nearby community colleges.

Some people take community college level courses at university, payit inflated prices for the false prestige of a mid tier school like American University. That's a waste. If you start University at a level above community college (which many people here did), and get a decent price, it's good.

If you can do both at the same time, or get basic classes out of the way in the summer at a community college, then it may be ok.

But delaying electives for two years would put you at a significant disadvantage in technical fields, imo. Not to mention the basic classes (math, physics, etc) will be a joke at a community college so you will have a weaker background.

The basic classes had good teachers and content at the CC I went to, on the same level as the university.

The downside is that you basically won't get into Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Yale... or most any other "top" college after going to community college. I know of one counter example, and I know of many very smart capable people who would have been capable and profited from such a degree, but missed their chance... which in turn made it VERY difficult to get any advanced degree.

Maybe that doesn't matter in CS/programming, but it does in lots of other (e.g. Engineering/Science) disciplines.

And where are you getting this information from? Just anecdotes of people you think are smart, went to community college, and got rejected?

Depends on where you live. The state schools in California are part of one big system so it's very easy to transfer from a community college to a UC (e.g. Berkeley) as long as you have the grades/aptitude.

> get into Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Yale

Based on everything I've seen over my roughly 20-year career in academia, plus the 18 years before that living in that world (my parents are both professors), what you get from going to Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Yale, and all the other "Big Name" schools is just that: the name.

The education you get there is not better than the education you can get at a small liberal arts college—in fact, it's often worse, because you're just one of tens of thousands, lost in the crowd, and you're extremely unlikely to get one-on-one attention from the professor if you have any trouble with the material.

Small liberal-arts colleges, on the other hand, so long as you're avoiding the ones that are specifically party schools, generally tend to focus much more on the teaching aspect, and especially on the personal attention aspect.

For more specialized degrees like engineering you may need to narrow your pool of those schools to find one that has a good program, but there are enough that unless your field (at undergrad level) is suuuuper-niche, you're very likely to be able to find one that works for you.

And while it's not universally true, they tend to be pretty good about taking transfer students.

I didn't study in the US, but having studied in college faculties staffed by professors who are at the cutting edge of their fields in my country, I can confidently say that the experience was unparalleled vs. my friends who didn't. In my undergrad one of my profs was a "may have been" Nobel prize winner. In my B-school, some of the profs essentially created the government's public policy in some fields. Their perspectives and insights during classes was quite enriching.

So I find your comments quite curious. Nowadays I tell my younger cousins and nephews/neices to research the faculties in colleges they are applying to and look at the quality and impact of their publications.

Outside the US, I don't know much about top universities beyond Oxford, Cambridge, and the Sorbonne, but my point really was pretty specific to the schools in the US that have big names—not big-name professors, but the schools themselves have names which, for whatever reasons, are well-known and confer prestige.

A university having a prestigious name is not synonymous with having Nobel Prize winners and influential professors. Hell, one of the professors at the small liberal arts college I work at is a Pulitzer Prize winning poet.

How deep is your connection to that star professor though? I tend to believe I visited a good university, and we also have some leading researchers. The problem is that you wouldn't know beforehand if they are even giving the lectures you're interested in. The other people in the department can still be bad at their job. Being a researcher doesn't transmit to being a good teacher. Or not a complete idiot.

Sorry if this sounds harsh, also I'm not trying to deliberately shit on my uni education, but let's just say I didn't find it great for many reasons. One course by a "leading expert" could have been pretty great, just that it was done in not so stellar English (the prof was German, so am I) and so it wasn't so great to understand.

If you just show up to learn and don't plan to stay in academia there (do a PhD, get to know the faculty) I really don't see a point.

When I was in high school, my state had a program where if you were eligible for high school but got accepted to any in-state college, the state would pay tuition. So, by the time I went to MIT, I had about 2.5 years' worth of credits from the University of Minnesota, including honors-level mathematics up through differential equations.

I was an arrogant superstar before I went to MIT. It wasn't that I thought that I was worth more than other students, but I felt my classes were a bit below me. I got all As, except for a B or B+ in my Intro to World Politics class at the UofM. As I remember, the way honors GPAs were calculated, I my GPA was above 4.0 at the UofM. In my high school "Enriched Chemistry" class (one level above honors, no extra GPA boost beyond, but all the kids there really wanted to learn), after I caught a couple of mistakes in exams, the teacher started marking my Scan-Tron answer sheets as the exam answer key, and in class, the whole class would together grade my exams the day after the exam to make sure the answer key was correct. There was one exam where the second-highest score was 90/100, so the teacher just added 10 points to everyone's score. At some point, I made one mistake the whole semester, so I ended the semester 9 points above 100%. At the UofM in my honors mathematics course, I was being graded on attendance and felt it was a bit of a waste of my time. I would read a newspaper in class. One day, the TA asked a couple times if anyone knew the answer to a problem, and I made a bit of a show of folding up my newspaper and proceeding to answer the question nobody else could answer. The honors math professor took me out into the hallway and proceeded to tell me "I don't care who you are. I don't care what kind of grades you get. If you bring a newspaper to class one more time, I'll have you thrown out of the program."

MIT was another level of challenges and expectations. Most of the kids there were used to being at the top of their class and getting cut a bit of slack from the teachers/administration because they were head-and-shoulders above their peers in high school. For most of us, it was a big ego hit and a big adjustment having to work very hard just to get a median grade.

The instruction at MIT was top-notch, but the real value was increased expectations, and excellent peers for both competition and support.

On the flip side, the ego hit is soul-crushing for some students.

The honors programs of state schools definitely have students every bit as smart and capable as people at MIT. The extra level of competition and expectations at MIT really does help some people shine, though. Also, the name is helpful as there's a pretty high minimum bar for getting an MIT degree. You might not be getting the best by hiring the MIT grad, but you're hiring someone who's pretty good.

That being said, I hope the age of GitHub, HackerRank, etc. diminishes the effects of brand-name schooling. I had a friend back in my honors math classes who also got into MIT, but couldn't justify the expense due to his dad being a welder and his mom a homemaker. MIT offered him a lot of loans and grants, but he got a full scholarship at the UofM honors program and could live at home while going to school.

I went to MIT, and I can confidently say it's no better than many schools a tier or two down. What you describe is a difference in personality, more than in tier. There are party ivies, and there are some really awesome 2nd or 3rd tier tech schools. Some of the lower-tier tech schools are just like MIT in virtually all respect, except brand.

That said, brand matters.

MIT now invests incredibly heavily in brand development, compromising integrity, research quality, and teaching-and-learning. For grads, that's paid off. My degree has gone up in value a lot over the years.

What do you make of Eric Weinstein's recent interview on Lex Fridman's AI podcast (both MIT alumni) specifically the taking back MIT portion:

https://youtu.be/rIAZJNe7YtE?t=6418

I've been conflicted with MIT as an institution ever since the death of Aaron Swartz, it stood by and then participated in what ultimately took the life of a great member of the hacker/tech community, but I understand and accept that so many great minds go there to create some of the greatest innovation the Human Species' is capable of.

It was sad to hear Eric's plight was the same trivial political non-sense and administrative corruption that I encountered in the low tier State Schools I attended, his impact was far greater to say the least of course. Which apparently also the case with Harvard. This seems systemic, and not just a prestige campus based occurrence.

The closest I ever got to MIT was a clim co-lab project I was involved in that was accepted into the finalist rounds in sustainability and presented on campus at the awards.

I couldn't attend the event as I was working on my startup in CO, so I didn't see it from within; but I was told by the project lead that it was a great experience, even if nothing really came of it--there is lots of hand shaking, but ultimately prize winners are given a small token sum, not really even seed money to get a project off the ground so the best thing you can do is network for well endowed collaborative partners and find leads for real funding.

I can't comment on the whole talk, since I only watched a little segment of it, but yes, for MIT to be a force of good in the world, it would need to be taken back by the nerds. I'd love to see that happen.

The leadership is overrun by brand-focused, power-seeking, money-grubbing sleaze-balls. That's drifted down, taking over some parts of the Institute, and leaving others okay-ish. But if left unchecked, it will take over the whole thing and ruin it.

We definitely still need a place in the world where nerds can do their thing.

It's hard for me to express how much less visible MIT was when I went there, and how much higher the quality of the research was as well. When I applied, scientists respected it, but popular audiences confused MIT with ITT. A highly-branded high-dollar MIT of the type we have today brings in the wrong sorts of people. Nerds have no chance of competing with them for power, and they have no chance of competing with nerds for intellectual curiosity.

But I think the time for taking back MIT may have passed.

Aaron Swartz is far from the worst thing that happened at MIT; things like that now happen regularly. MIT "wised up" to the use of NDAs and non-disparage agreements in protecting its branding.

As someone who grew up in a no-name mid-western town, I can't stop counting my lucky stars for becoming one of the first students ever in my high school's history to become accepted to a Top 10 university. Every job opportunity and connection I've made since graduating is directly attributable to my school's name. It wouldn't be an understatement to say that going there changed my life. I know for a fact that there would have been a lot more societal barriers had I gone to the nearby state school instead (my startup would not have been able to raise venture capital and my would-be resume would not have made it past the resume screening stage at FAANG companies because of all of the subtle social signaling involved; people from my school would not have even given me the time-of-day). Things wouldn't have just been a lot harder; they might have even been impossible.

Sounds to me like you benefited specifically from what I mentioned: not the education you gained at the unnamed Top 10 school, but its reputation and connections got you where you are.

I want to be very clear that I'm not saying "you shouldn't go to these schools"—I'm saying "if you go to these schools, recognize that what you're getting that you won't get anywhere else is not a better education, it's the school's name."

I would even go one step farther and say it's a mixture of both.

The classes at my uni could move at a more intense pace than other schools, and the problem sets and exams were also more difficult, given the academic aptitude of my class. Go on the MIT Open Courseware web site, and take a look at the physics problem sets to get an example. I'm not sure there are too many other freshman physics classes that require pulling all-nighters to solve the challenge problems.

Sure, I could always challenge myself more wherever environment I was in (I taught myself linear algebra and C++ coding in high school, even though nobody I knew in real-life could help), but there is a LOT said to be surrounded by peer pressure, mentorship from world-class professors, and other motivated, top-notch students with the same drive for success. I would not have pushed myself to do better to the extent that I did at my uni.

I don’t think any of the schools I mentioned have 10s of thousands of students or faculty ratios of more than 10to1. I think you’re comparing small schools (which most ‘mafia schools’ are) to big state schools which are usually much cheaper. Why liberal arts would be a good choice for a tech degree I don’t know, but I agree it’s not so important undergrad.

The big thing you get besides ‘the name’ is your relations and links to your cohort. That really helps get good jobs!

> which in turn made it VERY difficult to get any advanced degree.

Absolutely false for STEM fields. Except for Stanford/MIT your flagship public school is probably a better tech school than any other private name-brand school. Yale is an ordinary tech school, with several public schools (Berkeley, UCLA, UCSB, UWash, UIUC, UMich, Ohio State, Penn State, Wisc-Mad off the top of my head) being significantly better and cheaper. And all will allow you in from community colleges.

Transfer spots can be more competitive than Freshmen spots. This would especially be true if more people were doing it.

I have no idea how admissions work. I've heard stories about soliciting applications from unqualified candidates so they can tout accepting 1% of applications and the number of applicants so they can sound more exclusive.

One would imagine in a fair world if you applied as a Freshman and as a Junior you'd have a higher chance of being accepted, if Junior applicants had a higher graduation rate they would bias accordingly, or if they started getting more Junior applications they would find more spots.

> I have no idea how admissions work. I've heard stories about soliciting applications from unqualified candidates so they can tout accepting 1% of applications and the number of applicants so they can sound more exclusive.

Its pretty corrupt, I already spoke on my first hand experience in other threads, but just look at what the recent admissions scandal yielded:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/investigations-college-admis...

The one at USC was the most blatant of all in my opinion:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-04-01/usc-admi...

> Transfer spots can be more competitive than Freshmen spots. This would especially be true if more people were doing it.

Agreed, that was my experience. Added on top of the limited slots for upper division transfer to a highly desirable school I was in the most impacted major of all and its unbelievably hard to transfer even if you meet all the criteria and you're already in the system.

The amount of BS posturing that takes place to have to 'justify' your acceptance to just want to get in and out and graduate is unfathomable when dealing with administration/acceptance committees, especially if they know they can use your spot to bring in International students that pay upwards of 5x more than you.

Personally, I still regret when I think of the business opportunities I turned down, ultimately motorsports was a better monetary investment then a career in the Life Sciences after the financial crises as cruel luck would have it.

I learned then that doing the seemingly safe, prudent and pragmatic thing isn't always the route you want to take in Life and that following the herd is seldom as rewarding as promised. At least if you fail following your own instinct it will be on your terms and hopefully provide you with a solid foundation and skill set to rebuild if/when needed. In addition to a richer Life experience.

Personally I'm a proponent of apprenticeships and online learning/certifications, which I think is where Universalizes are going to have to migrate towards for a majority of their programs if they have any chance of surviving this post-corona World in the long run.

>What's the downside to going to a community college? Where I grew up the credits were transferable.

Depends on the quality of the school. If it's a top school then transferring can be difficult, you lose on networking opportunities (with students and professors), potential internships/summer research and arguably get a weaker education (although, true, it matters less the first couple years). I've taken courses at a community college and at a top school, the later was much more rigorous and fast moving.

> Depends on the quality of the school. If it's a top school then transferring can be difficult, you lose on networking opportunities (with students and professors)

Where I grew up a 2 year degree allowed you to transfer as a 3rd year student at any university in that state. The other option was to take specific credits at a CC and credit them to university (I believe degree focused classes were excluded from transferring in). At least looking at my program, none of your degree focused classes started until the 3rd year. All of the gen-ed classes were massive at the university. So a lot of opportunities for networking are minimized (unless it was around an extra-curricular activity).

My path was going to a university for a couple years. I ignored CC classes because I was a bit too arrogant, but left that university because of the BS. Much of that could have been avoided by taking some classes at the local CC. I ended up moving states to pursue a career and planned to get a degree if I hadn't started a career by the time I qualified for in-state tuition--but I never made it back to school.

Since then I've had the opportunity to interview college grads. That process has made me question the quality of many top school's education.

I don't think one path is better than another. I just wanted to let people know the 4-year university path isn't the only option. I wish I had finished a degree. I've poured over friend's class notes from college and grad school and wish I had the opportunity to take those classes.

I took some community college classes in high school through a program we had with them. The environment and students were very underwhelming. Your mileage may vary.

I got to take relevant classes (CS) in my very first quarter of college. The first two years it was a 50/50 split. The biggest benefit was being among smart, interesting people. College was way better than any previous educational experience, by far.

That being said I didn't experience waiting for core classes. The class sizes were typically very large though. Taking these on the side at a community college while attending a 4 year college sounds like a good idea. I'm just opposed to putting everything on hold for 2 years to do basic classes. I don't think a community college is the place to explore interests.

You don't have to put anything on hold. If you're motivated, you'll start learning what you have to on your own.

To be transparent, I went to a community college for 2 years and honestly can't recommend it enough for the reasons listed by the OP. I learned a lot better in the small class setting, and a good ratio of my professors were actually good at teaching (unlike the university I ended up going to where teaching was a necessary evil for professors).

> I'm just opposed to putting everything on hold for 2 years to do basic classes. I don't think a community college is the place to explore interests.

In my state a 2 year community college degree allowed you to transfer as a 3rd year student into any state university. You could also pick and choose individual classes, but they may not transfer directly. I believe a lot of states are like this. The only thing you have to be careful about is if you want to transfer out of state. Schools aren't incentivized to allow you to transfer credits (or test out of classes).

I just wanted to let others know that's an option and it shouldn't be stigmatized. I think I was a little too arrogant to pursue community college classes and because of my frustrations with the university I left.

He said the first two years. In a lot of cases you can still get the same 4-year degree with two years of CC if done properly, which would actually result in a higher ROI.

> 1) Most top schools offer free tuition if your family income is below a generous threshold (like $150k). If you can get into Stanford and meet this criteria, it's cheaper than your local community college.

This is only a few private schools doing this and they account for well under 1% of all people attending university in the US so not really relevant.

You're still getting a degree. I work/have worked with people who went to MIT, Harvard, Yale, etc. and the degree only mattered for them in the case they wanted to do research or for their first job. Beyond that it has very little value in the job market. The fact that I got to the same place they did without a degree also says something.

tl;dr you're choosing to disagree with good general advice because it doesn't account for 0.02% of americans

If you have a scholarship, this advice may not be good. I think most scholarships expect you to start that fall; if you don't, you may lose the scholarship. (Some or all of them will accept a "gap year", but most won't accept you going to community college for two years and then trying to take the scholarship.

Or at least, that's how I think it is. Your mileage may vary, so if you have a scholarship offer, check the rules for that scholarship rather than listening to me.

Many scholarships are available to students while in college. Many people don't even apply to them because they don't know about them or care at that point.

Where I went, the Student Affairs office knew more about scholarships than the financial aid office.

I wonder why the downvote? If you, or if you have kids going to college, make sure they're on every internal mailing list possible that college has. That's how I found out about a lot of scholarships. I didn't have any debt because I found out about the scholarships and asked staff and professors to nominate me.

A professor who hears about a scholarship, or a department head who emails their staff, generally doesn't think to include the financial aid office, or any other office in the university.

I'm on the fence about how scholarships should factor into the total cost of college. I feel like there is a decent amount of scholarship money freshmen year that disappears after that. So that the student ends up with a lot of student loans debt to finish school. It's all well and good that freshmen at an expensive college will be cheaper than some alternate school. Though is it really going to be cheaper overall? I don't think so and this is how lots of students end up with to much student debt.

Good point. Is it a four-year scholarship, or a one-year scholarship, or a one-year-with-option-to-renew scholarship? If it's the last, how common is renewal? And, do you feel lucky?

I studied engineering. There were a ton of scholaships available to any student. The financial aid office generally never finds out about except that the receive a check from some organization or company and are told to deposit in my account.

There are plenty of scholarships, just the communication about them is extremely poor. You have to get on every mailing list your university has, and constantly ask professors if they've heard about any scholarships.

Many of the scholarships I got were from companies or organizations that reached out directly to professors.

A primary reason to attend the most exclusive college you can is the academic caliber of your fellow students.

You mean high socioeconomic caliber, don't you?

High academic caliber peers are easily available online.

Given that probably the biggest by far factor for success in most anything is connections and networking the later is a lot less useful than the former.

Strongly agree. Community college enabled me to knock out almost 2 years of school in 1 year by taking classes during the regular semester, weekend classes, online classes, and summer classes. I also saved tens of thousands of dollars, and had much smaller class sizes than at the university. My professors were only focused on educating, not research, not arguing over grant money, and not flying around to conferences. I found my community college classmates more mature. Many students in the university seemed to be there because their parents wanted them to be there.

I've noticed that a lot of the students at the community college I went to were more mature as well. They all had stronger convictions for going to school as most of them were older and had spouses and children they were trying to build a better life for. Other types I found were people who were switching careers due to a life-changing event (pregnancy, work accident, rent increases) and even a good amount of immigrants who were fervently trying to pursue the American dream. All of them had a lot to lose if they didn't succeed, and I believed they worked so hard because all of them knew what it was to fail, unlike many of us high school grads. Needless to say the mentality at my community college helped build strong study habits within me, and inspired me to hang in there when times got tough (just like the classmates I used to work with did).

I got what I still think is the sweetest deal: I was able to take all but one of my classes at community college for my freshman year, while living in the dorms at the state university. It was cheaper to do it that way and the experience was practically the same. In fact, I'm not sure most of my friends even remembered that's what I was doing, since we all had different majors and classes anyway.

Pro tip: if you live in California, there's something called IGETC, which is a set of GE classes you can take at a community college. Look up the equivalent in your state.

Once you do that, you don't have to take GE classes at most UCs and CSUs.

Transfer students typically take IGETC classes at community college, which is what allows them to graduate in 2 years once they transfer.

I realized I could take these classes while in high school and so I finished all my IGETC classes while in high school. It did a middle college program my senior year, but even if I didn't I probably could still finished IGETC, by taking community college classes online and using AP scores.

This allowed me to graduate in 2.5 years from UC Berkeley with a CS degree. I didn't have to take any GE classes at all in college (though of course I could've if I wanted to). I then paid off my student debt after a couple months of starting my first job.

This is the best of both worlds: don't spend two years at a CC (which was never too fun for me) and also graduate early from whatever college you go to.

This trick worked for me because I knew from the start I wanted to go to Cal or another UC. If my goal was to go to a private or Ivy League school, this wouldn't have worked.

I do kind of regret not applying to Stanford or any Ivy League schools, but I think going hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to go to a more prestigious school, and having to stay there longer, just isn't worth it. I would've gone to Cal even if I got into these schools for this reason.

Especially as someone who wants to start a startup, this much debt will make you a lot less willing and able to take risks.

I took a similar path to you. I did 2 years at CC and 1.5 years at UC.

And oh man, IGETC is bringing back some memories.

The resource I found useful for CC students in California was the https://assist.org tool to 1:1 map out your CC units against your CSU/UC credits so you are in and out of there efficiently (or better yet, are able to sign a guaranteed transfer agreement which can relieve some long-term stress about the admissions process).

Bonus points -- at least when I was at CC, I recall SATs were not required (although I had done them during high school), nor were the foreign language requirements quite as stringent!

Anecdotally, I felt like 4 years at a university was not enough time to really grasp the college experience.

Also maybe a lot of American students aren’t aware of this, but there are many “needs based” government scholarships out there that can make your state university effectively free to attend. I attended a state university from 08-12 and didn’t pay a dime, thanks to the Pell Grant and some needs-based scholarships from my state (Arizona Assurance).

It seems like the rough spot with regards to paying for college is being too rich to qualify for the needs-based scholarships and too poor to have your parents be able to afford everything. For that, I sympathize and would probably recommend the community college approach.

I don’t think your point is germane to the article, but to support it nonetheless:

I love to hire folks, even new graduates, who did the CC-to-UC track, and am sorry than many are embarrassed about it. They tend to have better focus and be more fun to work with.

I have a couple of friends who teach at CC in the Bay Area, one of whom was previously an assistant prof at Stanford for a couple of years.* They both have told me that they like the CC Because the students want to be there, do their homework, and want to learn. I remember as a TA that many Stanford students didn’t seem all that dedicated to doing their homework unless it counted in the grade, though all of them were smart and interesting.

* I believe Stanford didn’t value his contributions and encouraged him to seek alternative employment. This was a long time ago.

I cannot agree with you more. I'm also in that broad spectrum of "millennial college graduate" -- specifically, my college years were during the beginning of the last financial crisis (the 2008 "great recession").

I remember the stigma about going to community college (even in the Bay Area, California) when all my high school peers were going straight to Stanford, UC Berkeley, Brown, etc.

But I remember that the CC classes were tough, afforded me a ton of independence and personal responsibility, and to my surprise, found my professors were also concurrently teaching at Stanford or UC Berkeley.

The CC had guaranteed transfer agreements with certain University of California (UC) campuses, and also had a neat program called https://assist.org which allows students to be smart about mapping the relevant CC courses with the equivalent [transferable] courses at the 4-year institution of choice.

I saved a ton of money, worked my way through CC, took a gap year to work full-time to save up (and/or internships to build my resume), and was able to graduate UC in only 1.5 years afterwards (while also working on campus). E.g. 2 years CC + 1.5 years UC.

Sure, I missed out on some college experiences, but I matured quick, it allowed me to ride out the recession into a very strong position, and I cannot recommend it enough to young folks today. Especially today.

For those wondering, I graduated into a down market, but ended up in various tech and engineering positions, with no discernible difference between my peers who had gone straight to Stanford or Brown or wherever else -- and in most cases, I somehow [luckily?] ended up faring a lot better than most of them.

Lastly -- your resume will only reflect the diploma from the 4-year institution, not that anyone's asked, but you do not get put into a second-tier or second-class position because you started at a CC and transferred into a UC or 4-year, which I recall, was one of my early worries when I was starting.

I'd love to reverse the stigma about CC's, because I'm immensely proud whenever I see other CC success stories -- it is the path less taken, and in many cases a lot harder upfront because of that stigma and the amount of independence and personal responsibility involved -- but I think the dividends can be rewarding long-term.

This is optimal advice.

I got a full ride to a decent state university but I wasted the first 3/4 trying to figure everything out myself because my high school college advisors were useless and because my parents had never been to college so they couldn’t help me out either.

Going to community college first is cheaper and oftentimes, some professors I had at university showed up in community to teach The same courses so it’s better value too.

Arguing in the other direction, if you mainly just need the sheepskin, this might be an unusually easy time to get one.

Personally, my college experience was mainly useful for discovering that my college experience wasn't going to be very useful for me.

(Mildly interesting: The author seems to be this woman. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/02/17/la-verne-seek...)

That article was Tiger-King-esque in that by the end of it I hated pretty much all the characters involved.

> , if you mainly just need the sheepskin, this might be an unusually easy time to get one.

It’s a good point: this year and next will have an unusually high percentage of pass/fail options, but networking will be quite restricted.

I've met 0 people to code with in college :(

That’s a shame; I’m have remained close friends with a couple of dozen dorm- and lab- mates even after 35 years. Even started a company with one 20 years ago.

And we were all non-gregarious nerds. I wonder if that is why?

My university was quite large, with about 4,000 undergrads and about the same number of grad students. My high school was about 40 students a year (240 total) and I am barely in contact with any of them.

She’s been run out of her job for political reasons using the excuse she used the term “assassinate” instead of “fire” to describe getting rid of somebody. It’s childish and the school should be liable for slander at this point

It was a character assassination on the school's part

I see what you did there.

I generally detest the large expense of universities given the difference between what they claim to offer and the actual value. That said, the options here seem to not be any better.

Get a job? Fresh out of high school kidd are going to have a hard time finding gainful employment for awhile, especially in the hardest hit areas.

Volunteer for a political campaign? Meh. That isn't much of a substitute, even if it has its own intrinsic value.

Why not encourage kids to instead look for schools that have been doing distance learning for years, or starting at a local community college instead? Its a heck of a lot less expensive (addressing the articles risk of investment point) and they are far less likely to take the money you ponied up for dormitory living while kicking you out.

Get a job? Fresh out of high school kidd are going to have a hard time finding gainful employment

In software I feel a strong guild/apprenticeship program could solve this.

The open source community serves as an ad hoc application of the apprenticeship / guild concept. I have some friends who don't have college degrees but have been hired due to their demonstrable and attested technical skill in serious FOSS projects

Wouldn't working on FOSS projects be closer to an internship rather than apprenticeship? Are they really being mentored and taught while working on the FOSS projects?

Yes it would be more akin to an internship rather than an apprenticeship. Also, contributing to open-source is not a learning experience like an apprenticeship can be. You cannot contribute to FOSS without a minimal skill level. Whereas, you can enter an apprenticeship from scratch.

Whether or not you agree with apprenticeship systems being good or bad, it is clear that the GP comment on FOSS being a replacement for an apprenticeship system is wrong.

> Volunteer for a political campaign?

How is that an option, do they house and feed you if you vomubt for a political campaign?

Sometimes, yes. It's common for local supporters to open their homes to out-of-state volunteers. When I was younger, I spent months living for free in a nice lady's basement in Iowa.

Another twenty-year professor here. I would just like to point out that this article is articulating -- with absolutely accuracy and lucidity -- every college administrator's worst nightmare. They've all been discussing the possibility (that parents and students will make this very decision) for weeks.

It might be the right decision to make, but it would be absolutely catastrophic for most schools.

In Australia many schools are additionally worried because the net effect of government interventionism on visa issuing, international arrivals and quarantine have hit the travel sector so badly that existing international students (their cash cow) have been forced to discontinue studies, and new international students are unable to arrive.

Where is the money going ?

Honest question here. Are professor really well payed?

Facilities cannot cost that much.

Universities would seem uniquely capable of just going into hibernation for a while. They do it every summer, after all. That tradition is even because of infectious disease risk!

What does it really cost to park a campus in "summer mode" a while longer?

Schools, particularly those without large endowments, often have large debts they have to service and rely on tuition for much of that. Building facilities is not cheap, and state governments have been providing less funding.

The people who work there might have been planning on 3 months w/o pay, but are expecting a job in the fall.

I wonder whether tenured professors can be laid off/furloughed?

Yes, they can be furloughed. This happened during the 2008 financial crises, and it already happened a few days ago at Univ of Arizona.

> Universities would seem uniquely capable of just going into hibernation for a while. They do it every summer, after all. That tradition is even because of infectious disease risk!

Most don't go into hibernation at all I grew up in Ithaca NY and both Cornell and Ithaca College ran summer camp programs through the summer. I later went to school in VA and saw the same thing -- tons of folks using the Uni even during the "off" season.

Summer school classes went all summer and there were always non-trivial amounts of students on campus, including living in dorms.

Research didn't just stop because the students went away -- in many cases the research kicked into high gear since the profs didn't have to teach.

Colleges with agriculture programs don't just let their fields die during the summer; same for schools that have restaurant or hospitality management programs.

I'm a former professor (tenured) and have been watching from the sidelines. I've been discussing this all with my friends still in university faculty positions.

I agree with you 100% but think the prospects of returning are not nearly as dire as some are making it out to be. I also think it depends a lot on the institution.

A lot of schools are going to reopen in the fall. By then there will be incredibly extensive testing and lockdowns will be mostly gone by a couple of months at least. If the quarantines continue the economic losses will boil over and there will be riots. There will be an increase in cases in the summer and then it will subside.

Many schools won't have any choice but to reopen. When they do, they'll probably offer extensive testing to incoming students as a service, probably some sort of current-status test as well as antibody test, as a courtesy and safety matter. They'll also make it incredibly easy to get for students who return, and will probably have a lot of policies in place to allow students on campus, and probably will have some kind of hybrid system in place where smaller seminars and classes will meet normally, but other things will kind of be pushed to a combination of online classes and smaller in-person classes. Large lectures will be gone for year or so, which probably should have been the case anyway. Students will be on campus again, but will be offered a lot of health services and courses won't be quite the same. Sports might be on hold in the fall.

College age students are probably the lowest risk of COVID complications of any age group, which will ease concerns about pandemics.

The bottom line is it doesn't matter what 20-year professors say. The students don't have anything else to do, and for a lot of them, they're not spending their own money anyway, or it's money that's all in the future in the form of debt. So rather than sitting at home, with their parents they tried to escape, they'll return. Open the doors and they will come.

Besides this, the feds will throw money at the universities like there's no tomorrow as a way of stimulating whatever they can. It's easy to politically justify. There won't be many strings attach to bring needed reforms (for example, eliminating indirect funds on grants) as now is not the time to ratchet down the screws. As a result the inexorable march toward nationalized higher education will continue even more among R1 institutions.

Smaller schools might struggle if they don't have enough money, and public unis being screwed by states or municipalities already (Arizona, as an example) will be in crisis. But many others will grumble and panic and then be fine.

I wish like hell this crisis would instigate a lot of changes to the bullshit that is higher ed at the moment, but it will not. And I disagree with Prof. Klein in her advice, at least as blanket advice that applies to everyone: students should consider their unique situation, as every case will be different in these times.

This seems pretty out of touch. Encouraging people to go right into the jobs market as 18yos without degrees is encouraging them to trap themselves at the (already rapidly expanding) bottom of the economic ladder, unless they're from an already upper/upper-middle-class family.

And the same goes double for encouraging degreeless 18yos to skip getting paid entirely and volunteer. That's rich kid stuff.

Most schools will allow you to defer for a year. Consider taking them up on it. And if they won’t let you, well, a school that admitted you once will probably admit you again (or a different one will

And:

There are other important, worthwhile things to do if you take a semester or even a full year off

And:

If you defer or postpone, what’s the worst that can happen

That's generally true unless there's a scholarship involved. Those are take-it or leave-it. If you had 50% of your tuition paid for by a scholarship would you leave it?

The article is not suggesting these people to avoid college as such, it's suggesting them to skip a year. Your college prospects won't be worse with a year of working experience, if anything, it really helps learning if you have a bit of context working in the direction of your studies.

A gap year would be great if you could work or travel - but travel is heavily restricted and with the historical record number of layoffs working is effectively killed too. And if you have scholarships in hand that may be rescinded if you don't start this Fall - then what are you to do? Yes, it's less than ideal and maybe your Freshman year is less than ideal. But it's a lot better than having your Sophomore, Junior or Senior years getting hit!

I'm looking at college this fall and seriously wondering about this. I'll have to spend a lot of money if I go to an "elite" school, and the point of doing that is to make connections with my peers and with professors. I don't see the point of paying that kind of money for that sort of experience. That aside, not starting college may not be a good idea, either. Does anyone with more experience have advice on this? I do have a job at a cybersecurity firm where I'm a part-time developer, and my boss would probably convert me to full-time. I've also been working on some interesting side projects to learn stuff and could continue self-teaching. Does anyone with more experience have some advice for me?

This really depends on why you want to go to university. Is it just for the knowledge and nothing else? Save the money and self learn. Since you specifically mentioned developer, you can take a look here https://ossu.firebaseapp.com/#/curriculum

I've looked at and talked to a lot of different people at different universities in comp sci bachelors. For the most part the curriculum is the same. What sets some schools apart are what you do on the side and general academic environment.

Some people might say that going to university just for the sake of a degree might be a waste, but again this depends on you and your circumstances. There are companies that only hire people with a degree. It's a stupid way to make a hiring decision, but here we are.

I've actually just finished my masters degree in info systems and can definitely understand your thought process. Let me know if you have any other questions. More than happy to help.

> I do have a job at a cybersecurity firm where I'm a part-time developer, and my boss would probably convert me to full-time.

You already have a job and your boss has made you a developer. One thing you'll get in school that you won't get on the job, in general, is algorithm training. This is an important step for developing the best code you can and being exposed to weird and different ways to write things. This is important.

I personally do not see a real advantage to going to an elite school, depending on how you define elite school. If you're speaking Ivy League or some school that's world renowned, then no, that's not really important, I don't think. You already have contacts in the industry and there are "lesser" schools that are still pretty great.

Your company might be willing to pay for your college education. It almost certainly won't be from MIT; but, it could greatly reduce the costs you're worried about.

The next thing to consider is future employment, not this employment. Future companies that you work for may want you to have a degree or look down on you for your lack of one. Lacking particularly impressive projects or lots of random technologies on your resume may cause this.

Whether you decide that's going to matter or not is up to you; but, I think the one thing you should make sure you have experience in, either way, are the classes seen as less important for day to day development: your algorithm classes, discrete math classes, and similar. You can get much of that education online and for either free (YouTube, etc) or through educational sites like Pluralsight.

I have no college education because decades ago, I was in the same situation as OP: had a job in hand, so I went to work instead of college. It was the best choice I ever made. I never worked somewhere that required a degree, three years into my career was making six figures, and have made at least that for the next ~20 years of my career. I had no student debt, or school expenses. I have had employers offer reimbursement to go get the the undergrad checkbox, which I’ve passed on (more important things to do IMHO).

YouTube, online material, and actual experience of trial and error will take you a long way without a degree. You probably also don’t want to work someplace that prioritizes a degree over experience. Don’t forget to network: that’s the biggest ROI you’ll ever have. It’s who you know, not what you know. Two cents from 20+ years.

> You probably also don’t want to work someplace that prioritizes a degree over experience.

No but I want to work on the things they're working on.

As much as I despise the absolute scam that's peddled by universities, and dont think they're for everyone, they can still open up a lot of opportunities that would otherwise be inaccessible or highly difficult to access. OTOH If all you're worried about is money, then yeah no, you probably don't want to waste your time there

Money buys options. Options are freedom. Don’t let others gate you unnecessarily. We all operate in a physical world that doesn’t care about credentials as long as you adhere to the laws of physics (caveat aside for professionals that require credentials by law, such as the medical profession and such).

Going to school in another country that’s more reasonable about costs (Europe comes to mind) is also an option.

Consider more efficient paths to the end state you desire is all I’m suggesting.

Or honestly state colleges. There's some really great state colleges in the US and they're far less expensive than some of the other options out there.

Do you feel not having a degree has slowed your career progression?

Not at all. I’ve worked for startups, enterprises, the US government, and provide guidance to Congressional representatives on an ongoing basis on technology policy. No one worth working for has asked for a degree.

I still get inquiries from Amazon and Facebook for roles. Not Google, but I’d never work for them anyway (nor Facebook or Amazon, for completeness).

I also intend to run for public office, which has age constraints, but no educational requirement.

As a counterpoint - having an elite school on your resume is beneficial for your career. It won't get you jobs, but it will get you interviews and can help you in the interviews (the interviewer's assumptions about you tend to be positive).

That was back when an elite degree meant that you had valuable social connections and not that you spent $80k a year watching ungraded lecture videos in your parents’ basement.

Go to college. While I have worked with engineers who didn’t attend university who were good engineers, the ones who attend university have a better, more mature approach to problem solving and learning new technologies. If you find a good computer science program, you’ll also gain a solid foundation on the underpinnings of the systems you’re working on — compiler design, CPUs, mathematics — and be worth so much more when you come to the table looking for a job.

Different perspective here. All the best engineers I have met are self-motivated generalists. Furthermore, I have had career mathematicians beg me not to study it, on the grounds that applied forms are more efficient. (Then again, I don't tend to hang out in large organizations that engage in relative edge-case activity such as compiler design or processor design. Probably mostly because I find large organizations deeply sociopathic and unproductive.)

The best pre-university advice I received was "if you can't decide, get some life experience first, since a huge percentage of people spend four years studying something then discover they dislike or aren't motivated by, then have to start from scratch and change professions".

We should all aim to study every day at a pace, breadth and currency that is unsupported formally. Set aside time to learn every day, and you will always be wise. You are perhaps most successful if you learn throughout most of the day.

The real job of upper management in the 20th and 21st century is to learn things, because change is the constant thing that's going on. - Alan Kay (2017)

... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

I think this depends a lot on what peers you have access to through your work and whether you'd expect them to be comparably awesome (both in their competence and the depth of relationship you're able to build with them) to whoever you'd meet in college.

Even if you do decide to go to college, I think you'd get a lot more out of it after having worked in the real world for some amount of time--in college it really helps to be good at deciding what to spend your time on, and exposure to what non-college life is like will help a lot with that. I know lots of people who got a ton out of gap years and no one who regrets it.

(I wrote more advice here: https://www.benkuhn.net/college/ )

I think it really depends how "elite" the schools you've been admitted to are. If you're accepted to MIT, Stanford, Harvard, etc. you'd be a fool not to go, IMHO. Not only will they give you loads of generous financial aid, but you'll get a signalling stamp on your CV that will follow you for a lifetime.

On the other hand, if you've been accepted to some expensive private school that isn't a household name (sorry WashU, Drexel, Dukes of the world) you might be better off skipping the debt and going to a credible state school.

Nobody has more experience on this set of circumstances - absolutely nobody. Some may have a better idea than others of how this is going to play out, but that's all.

Once you are five years out of college, your resume lists work experience and the year you graduated from college. Most folks won't care whether you were the hotshot that got early admission, or the kid that took an extra year to finish university.

The framework I would use here is: is this a reversible or irreversible decision? Some factors I would consider:

- Do you think you will enjoy it? For me, it was four years of responsibility (buying groceries, doing my own laundry, learning to cook) but also four years of freedom (choosing my own bedtime, dating without being judged by parents).

- Can you defer an offer / reapply next year? (Ask the admissions department; most of the time the answer is yes, but there are details.)

- Do you have peers from high school that are going this year? (No one I knew was still hanging out with their high school friends after Thanksgiving, but I found it helped with the loneliness of the first week of living in dorms.)

- Do you have a place to live if you don't go to college? (Does your job cover rent for your own place? Alternatively, are you on good enough terms with your parents to stay in your bedroom / in their basement?)

- Would inertia lead you to never go to college? You may find it harder to go to college once you have a comfortable adult quality of life. If this happens to you, would you regret it?

- Will you have opportunities to socialize in college? (Dorms, student clubs, student newspapers, etc.)

- Do you think the job market will have recovered by the time you graduate? (I started my Bachelor's in 2009. On the other hand, folks are saying that the current recession is worse than the '08 crisis.) Where is the breakeven point for lifetime earnings between current job versus post-college job with college debt?

- What are plausible bad-case outcomes for each path, and how can you mitigate the downsides? Time-box this to maybe an hour of research: you want to be emotionally prepared for this possibility but not let it become all-consuming anxiety. (Consider: What does the world look like if we don't find a vaccine?)

Top schools (MIT, Stanford, etc.) have generous financial aid packages if you can get in. They'll provide you a well rounded technical education which sometimes is hard to achieve/force one-self to do when self-teaching. Networking should also not be understated since it pays off hidden dividends down the line. In five years fewer will care you went to MIT but if it helped you get a Facebook internship that then helped you get a Google offer that then helped you get a great startup offer it's still helping you indirectly. Right now having no college degree also prevents you from getting certain jobs or makes it much harder.

I graduated in 2016 and would recommend everyone possible go to college. Without a degree you are effectively in a lower tier on all job applications, promotion tracks, etc. A degree teaches you how to think, how to be responsible, and is kind of a mark of approval from society.

College is four years of fun anyway, not everything needs to be about progressing your career.

There must be a lot of people thinking they won't be getting the full experience if they start this year. I wonder if this will be the pin which pops the credit fueled runaway costs bubble?

Anyone who ends up not bothering with it at all will at least have great reason for not having a degree - well I was all set to go to such and such, but then coronavirus, so I started work for a while instead, and just really got into the whole working hard thing...

I don’t see how the college bubble continues as-is after this. What we had before was basically a common knowledge problem. Everyone knows college is a ripoff and, aside from a small number of degrees, the students are mostly just getting subsidized by taxpayers to drink and smoke pot for four years while the rest of us work and pay taxes. But, we didn’t all know that everyone knows that. There was also a coordination problem in that even if everyone is skeptical of the value provided by the experience, the pool of college graduates was still some combination of smarter and more conscientious than the pool of non-college graduates, so there was a signaling effect to going to college. But now a lot of smart, conscientious young people have an excuse to bail out of the system at the same time. I think many of those young people will end up doing something with this time that sounds better to employers than “I spent $80k a year living in my parents’ basement watching ungraded online lecture videos that were inferior to ones I could watch for free on YouTube.”

These kids that drink and smoke pot are paying in personal debt, the taxpayer is not really subsidizing this (at least based on what I was reading). For most career paths outside a small portion of the technology, college is the only way.

Part of the problem is that the US is not spending enough taxpayer money into education. If the US spends a portion of it military budget 570B$ to enhance education spending 70B$ problem could be massively reduced. To compare Germany military spending 50B€ and education 130B€.

The US spends plenty of money on education. If the data on this site is accurate, local, state, and federal spending makes up about 6.35% of US GDP: https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/education_spending

vs. it looks like about 4.8% from Germany. Maybe there’s some discrepancy in how those numbers are calculated, but they’re at least not wildly different.

Universities in Germany are mostly free with generous system of funding for poor students.

From attached link most of the spending is on state and local level.

>Federal education spending: The federal government had little involvement in education in the early 20th century. This changed in the 1930s when federal education spending increased from less than 0.05 percent of GDP to over 0.3 percent of GDP. Federal education spending decreased during World War II but then increased to a peak of 1.03 percent of GDP in 1949 as it funded education for veterans in the GI Bill. Federal education spending declined in the 1950s to 0.3 percent of GDP, but began an increase in the mid 1960s reaching a peak of 1.2 percent of GDP in 1979. Thereafter federal education spending declined to about 0.6 to 0.7 percent of GDP in the 1980s and 1990s before increasing modestly to nearly 0.8 percent of GDP in the 2000s.

> In the early 2010s federal education spending declined to 0.7 percent in 2015, and is expected to be 0.5 percent GDP by 2020.

I think you might be surprised what you learn if you ask students who are about to enroll in college if they think it's a rip-off. I bet basically none of them say yes. Some graduates such as myself might even tell you that they value their college education, even though they ended up working in something completely unrelated to their field of study.

I think this is a great article, however, I think a more tempered approach may be to take online courses from a community college or similar to begin working on at least some gen eds.

This frees you up to do some of these other things that article suggests, while still getting credits under your belt.

It's important to note that some colleges restrict the number of credits you can take/earn during the time between high school graduation and college matriculation.

My alma mater, Purdue, permits incoming freshmen to take a gap year (but not purely due to Coronavirus [0]). During that year, the would-be freshmen may not take >=12 credit hours of courses or else their admission will be rescinded and the freshmen would be required to reapply as a transfer student [1].

[0]: https://admissions.purdue.edu/faq/

[1]: https://www.admissions.purdue.edu/gapyear/index.php

Behavior like this and the for-credit/not-for-credit distinction (for the same class!) is some rent-seeking, power-imbalance nonsense. I hope we figure out a better way.

I would disagree. If you were accepted, but then had significant changes to your application you should reapply.

It makes sense that an acceptance is good for 3 months, and then you’ll need to reapply after that. If you went to a new school, the reapplication process is different.

Pick a better college than this one then. There are plenty.

Observations from overseas (Sweden): possibly because college/university is typically (almost) free of cost and because of Sweden's culture of continuous education, there is an increase in university enrollment applications: https://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx. I must say that I like that in times of high unemployment, the "free education" feature allows people to further educate themselves when there are little employment opportunities. IMO, this feature takes the risk burden (that the article is mentioning) off the individual.

If lots of smart people decide to not start then it might be easier to get in for the Fall semester if you're less able. That is, it might be to your advantage to start college this Fall.

Here's my take: if you get into a top engineering/CS program, you should still go.

What we are going to see this year is a "run on the colleges". Just like there were runs on the banks in the 19th century, we will now have a new phenomenon, of run on the colleges. Right now colleges are preparing for a 20% decreased enrollment for the Fall semester. Due to blog posts like this one, and generally people talking with one another, a lot of students will realize that if schools are budgeting for an 80%-year, it's better to skip the year and come back in Fall 2021. My guess is that we'll actually see a 40% reduction in enrollment.

This will not make a difference for institutions like Harvard, Yale, Stanford with huge endowment funds. But it may break the back of many a poorer college. The 2020-21 academic year is going to be very interesting...

perhaps a little bit premature advice

college students are not at risk to begin with - I'd recommend waiting closer to mid summer

it might be the best time to attend college, fewer people enrolled, getting more attention from educators etc

Professors, faculty, and parents are at risk, though. If corona infects a dorm it will rip through like wildfire. You'll have 100's of asymptomatic carriers overnight.

Then they go home for break...

And staff, likely the largest cohort. And least privileged.

Everyone is at risk from Covid-19. Younger people are at less risk, but they are still at risk, both from suffering a severe case, and from death.

As of April 17, in the age group of 15-24, 13 deaths were attributable to COVID-19, 37 to influenza.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/

If you are a college student the risk of dying of alcohol poisoning is higher than of COVID-19.

If school was back in session, that number would probably be much higher. Remember, these are the numbers with the most massive pause on our economy and society that we’ve seen in our lifetime. Young people are not immune.

all the evidence points to an extremely strong age dependency on both infection likelihood, and most importantly on the severity of cases.

Nothing is ever 100% but if the rest of the population had the same characteristics as the youth there would be no reason for a lockdown to begin with. We are talking about death rates of 1 in 100K cases.

For young people the flu is far more dangerous than COVID-19. Of course for alarmists this is heresy that should be never talked about.

But how many people had COVID vs influenza?

It doesn’t list case fatality rate, so your argument is just like everyone who says “the flu is deadlier than COVID”. Flu cases aren’t growing exponentially.

There was a time when school was about teaching students and not protecting the staff first.

Janitors can work at night. Cafeterias can be take out. Profs can be on a screen or given early retirement. I realize it is an inconvience, but how about students first for the first time in a long while.

We collectively are safer if the college kids are away at school and not infecting grandma.

> Don’t like any candidates? Then get engaged in issue activism.

Recommendations to be politically active regardless of the cause and position sound rather vacuous. Or rather - sound like someone has an opinion, but not the guts to voice their opinion.

Anyway, the main problem is the debt issue. If students going into the first year of University (or "college") did not have to pay for it, it wouldn't be such a gamble.

So, here's the political cause to pursue:

* Occupy your university campuses, state parliaments and governors' offices, together with existing and other incoming students, to

* Demand tuition-free higher education and free/discounted housing for students, in both "private" and state/federal-state-owned institutions, effective immediately. And let the federal government do some "quantitative easing" to pay for that - which they seem to have no problem doing ten times over to cover the financiers' losses.

Even in regular times, this is not an outlandish demand and not even revolutionary; it's a meaningful but not earth-shattering reform. In these times and with the Corona crisis it is closer than usual to achievability, especially w.r.t. the potential of mobilizing students.

PS - If organized labor in the US had not been so week, an alliance on common demands would have been quite relevant, but at the moment it's not a realistic recommendation.

Far too many people go to college as it is. More subsidies to go to college only make that problem worse.

1. These are (mostly) independent issues. Many countries have free universities, but not many of them.

2. I don't know what US colleges are like; but - higher education is to a great extent its own rewards. Of course, if you're doing it for the diploma and the chance to score a better job, then it's a different kettle of fish.

What are the practical, social negatives of this? Will in-demand schools hold a grudge on the thousands or more of students they would have liked to have in fall 2020 and skipped? "You weren't there for us in 2020 so we think you're better off elsewhere."

Not that any university should behave this way; I'm asking if any quality ones would be.

No. In 2020, students entirely have the upper hand. Colleges can no longer grow and shrink their classes according to the suitability of students. Their finances are dire.

(In principle, the rich ones like Harvard could, but they won't either. Falling enrollments just wouldn't look good.)

Large bureaucracies do not have the agency to act in such a childish way.

No for-profit university will turn away someone they think can pay, and especially not someone who looks like they might turn into a rich donor in the future.

I'm not sure this fall would be a great time to work on a political campaign either, since you might not want to be meeting a lot of people in person. I guess you could improve your phone and video conferencing skills, though?

Giving online courses a try seems like a good idea.

If people follow that, colleges might decide to lower the entry requirements and the amount of students who join this year might be similar to the usual amount.

Perhaps a better approach would be to plan safe working conditions instead.

If their money is green, you can bet that this will happen.

Somehow the Americans outdid themselves. Six figure debt is now the norm? Despite being completely over funded colleges still cut their important staff?

Is the best thing a new high school grad can do to become more tech literate really brush up on their "Blackboard skills"?

Yeah that was a bit silly, even saying something as basic as PowerPoint or Excel would have been better.

By the time it is fall, this professor's advice will be obsolete. The death rate is already slowing down in NYC and Italy. The curve is flattened in South Korea and China, and there, many are going outside to cafes and the Han River park. San Francisco has had a grand total of 20 deaths. US is already planning to gradually reopen the economy.

On the contrary: Reopening before the test and trace infrastructure (like South Korea’s) is in place is likely to cause another wave right about the time when the Fall Semester is starting..

That sounds like pure speculation. We should be relying on data, instead of fear, for motivating our decisions.

not pure speculation. There's historical precedence in the Spanish Flu for a resurgence of the disease after social distancing orders are ended too early.

We were already discussing this in the cousin thread.

As feedback, I would feel safer if you used the name "1918 Pandemic" rather than naming viruses where they might have came from. I have personally seen and been targeted by daily overt acts of aggression (in San Francisco, no less) because of these kinds of false associations.

I'm aware of that, and if there were a risk of acts of hatred against Spanish folk by me using that name today, I'd agree, however we're talking about a pandemic that spanned 1918 and 1919, with the second wave in 1919. Using "Spanish Flu" is, however, clear and well understood.

On the topic of how geographic disease names have often been used in racist or at least nationalistic ways, check out this hilarious map of the geographic distribution of names for "syphilis": https://digg.com/2017/syphilis-name-map

The Korea Center for Disease Control and Prevention said it's trying to understand why the patients retested positive for COVID-19 despite previous negative tests.

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2020/04/18/COVID-19-Survivor...

Not to mention: Denver had a significant spike in 1918 when interventions were removed.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EVHzq2AWkAEhbJo.jpg

Note: I didn't locate this image on WashPo's site.

I'm sure you see why a graph of just Denver is suspicious. It strongly suggests that the rest of the country saw a smaller second hump or no second hump at all, so the graph makers had to exclude it.

I don't see why it is suspicious. It may have been redacted but there's nothing intrinsically wrong AFAICT.

Howard Markel, M.D., Ph.D. of the University of Michigan Center for the History of Medicine talks about the 2nd hump:

https://www.mdlinx.com/physiciansense/covid-19-is-a-second-p...

Beat me to it. It's really egregious how many disingenuously flawed graphs (one even suggesting that the death rate passed up heart disease!) and faulty mathematical models (dY/dt=kY) there are floating around. This is why education is important because ignorance is placing blind trust in the media (whose narrative of fear helps to glue more eyeballs). There's plenty of indications we've already hit the inflection point:

Nature: Antibody tests suggest that coronavirus infections vastly exceed official counts https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01095-0

SFGate / Stanford: Study investigates if COVID-19 came to Calif. in fall 2019 https://web.archive.org/web/20200408180013/https://www.sfgat...

From the very article you linked (did you actually read it?): "'At the moment, we think there is no danger of further secondary or tertiary transmission,' Kwon said." We had 8 new cases today, and 6 were from Americans/Europeans entering the country. Given that I lived in Korea for two years and have a fair amount of friends and family there, I am a bit familiar with their situation.

I just can’t believe these friends, or folks. We can do so much better.

One thing for sure the all these colleges that was charging rates up to the stars is gonna be in a real shit storm staring now

Yup, and if you are already in college don’t enroll in new classes until at least 2021 if you can freeze tuition. It is such a ripoff to be paying for world class education and end up with some basic online courses tossed together in a hurry due to a pandemic. Not to mention missing out on the social networking aspects that college life brings.

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